What's New Friday May 2, 2008

WHAT’S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday   02 May 08   Washington, DC

1.  HYBRIPHOBIA: REMEMBER WHEN POWER LINES CAUSED CANCER?
EMF stopped causing cancer in 1997, but no one bothered to tell Jim 
Motavalli, who wrote an Automobile column in the Sunday New York Times 
about the risks of EMF in hybrids.  According to Motavalli the National 
Cancer Institute studied the cancer risks associated with electromagnetic 
fields.  And so it did - but it couldn’t find any.  You might think 
Motavalli would at least check the Archives of the New York Times.  On 
July 3, 1997, the day the massive four-year NCI study of power lines and 
cancer appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Gina Kolata 
reported in the Times that the study was unambiguous and found no health 
effects associated with electromagnetic fields.  An editorial in the same 
issue of the Journal put it in perspective: "Hundreds of millions of 
dollars have gone into studies that never had much promise of finding a 
way to prevent the tragedy of cancer in children.  It is time to stop 
wasting our research resources."  It all began in 1979 when Nancy 
Wertheimer, an unemployed epidemiologist, and her friend Ed Leeper, drove 
around Denver looking for common environmental factors in the homes of 
childhood victims of leukemia.  It practically jumped out at them - every 
home had electricity.  Their study was so flawed it would have been 
laughed off but for Paul Brodeur, a scientifically-ignorant writer for The 
New Yorker.  He wrote a series of terrifying articles about power lines 
and cancer that were collected in a 1989 book, Currents of Death.

2. FOOD PANIC: NOT ENOUGH FOOD, OR TOO MANY MOUTHS?
President Bush has asked Congress for an additional $770M in emergency 
food assistance for poor countries.  The only complaint from Congress was 
that it won’t be available until the new fiscal year in October.  But 
these countries are poor because they are overpopulated, undereducated, 
and women have no control over reproduction.  Food won’t solve the problem 
unless it’s linked to women’s rights including easy access to the pill and 
education in its use.

3. GINA:  THE GENETIC INFORMATION NONDISCRIMINATION ACT.   
It passed Congress and Bush says he will sign it.  That’s good news; it’s 
tough enough getting stuck with risky genes, without being denied 
insurance or a job because of your genome.  The growth of genetic tests 
makes passage of the bill urgent, but it’s Louise Slaughter (D-NY) who 
almost alone pushed the bill for 13 years.  Daughter of a Kentucky coal 
miner, she earned degrees in microbiology and public health from the 
University of Kentucky.  

4. CLIMATE: IT’S WARMING – EXCEPT RIGHT NOW IT’S COOLING.
There is a lot happening on this complicated planet besides greenhouse 
warming, so it’s not too surprising that things added up to give us a 
little cooling.  And give the warming deniers a rare - and temporary - 
victory.  As we understand it, vacillating ocean floes spell a cooling 
trend up until about 2015, and then we can get back to warming.  Oh sure, 
say the warming deniers.

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
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